Thursday, November 05, 2009

BloodLust! artists Haptic and The Fortieth Day visual collaborator Lisa Slodki (AKA Noise Crush) open an exhibition/installation this week at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago:

Haptic and Lisa SlodkiNovember 6-29, 2009

Using analogue sound technology and found images, experimental musicians Haptic (Steven Hess, Joseph Clayton Mills, and Adam Sonderberg) and video artist Lisa Slodki (a.k.a Noisecrush) collaborate to create real time, improvised, audiovisual environments. Characterized by a rigorous attention to sonic detail, Haptic creates densely textured soundscapes that range from stark minimalism to carefully controlled chaos. In response to Haptic's music, Slodki uses VCRs, video monitors, and projections of digitally manipulated found footage to generate images that emphasize subtle emotions and gestures. In addition to a collaborative sound and video installation, Haptic and Slodki perform live each Tuesday evening in the UBS 12 x 12 gallery, where the visual and auditory components of their performance are mixed and created within the space.

Experimental musicians Haptic (Steven Hess, Joseph Clayton Mills, and Adam Sonderberg) and video artist Lisa Slodki (a.k.a Noisecrush) discuss their work and ideas during this informal gallery talk. Please join them for an After-Party in the Café following the talk for further conversation, and enjoy images and music selected by the artist. After Party ends at 8 pm.

Using analogue sound technology and found images, experimental musicians Haptic (Steven Hess, Joseph Clayton Mills, and Adam Sonderberg) and video artist Lisa Slodki (a.k.a Noisecrush) collaborate to create real time, improvised, audiovisual environments. Characterized by a rigorous attention to sonic detail, Haptic creates densely textured soundscapes that range from stark minimalism to carefully controlled chaos. In response to Haptic's music, Slodki uses VCRs, video monitors, and projections of digitally manipulated found footage to generate images that emphasize subtle emotions and gestures. In addition to a collaborative sound and video installation, Haptic and Slodki perform live each Tuesday evening in the UBS 12 x 12 gallery, where the visual and auditory components of their performance are mixed and created within the space.

AIM LOW “Our mantra throughout booking this was to make it the most negative show ever,” says fest organizer Shane Broderick, arms raised at right, with Twodeadsluts Onegoodfuck.

Inside the dusty corner room of a dungeon-like warehouse basement, Karl Giesing dumps out a bag full of pedals, samplers, grimy cables, and homemade synth boxes. Their functionality seems questionable. Giesing, clad in black leather jacket, scratches his goatee, and it starts to come back to him.

“Shane Broderick did a backflip into my gear at the end of my last set. I’m not sure if any of it’s going to work.” Turns out everything’s fine when he plugs in — you can tell from the awful, tortured-livestock sounds suddenly bleating from his speakers. Crisis averted!

Performing as Karlheinz, Giesing plays a kind of music called power electronics, a well-worn format in experimental circles hated by plenty for its vicious noise, violent shows, and creepy lyrical content obsessed with murder, fascism, rape, and worse. There are no beats, no melodies; there’s nothing resembling a sing-along chorus. It’s Hell’s Angels without the bikes, horrorcore without the fans. “This is a very anti-social type of music.”

This weekend, the second annual Northeast Noise and Power Electronics Festival promises to cram into O’Brien’s and Jacque’s Cabaret the nastiest line-up of diseased audio spew imaginable. Locals like Karlheinz will bash heads with relatively world-famous pioneers like Consumer Electronics, Bloodyminded, and Strom.ec (from Finland), with bits of grindcore thrown in for good measure.

I meet with Broderick — who organized this edition along with Egan Budd’s Existence Establishment, and who’s headed the vile trio Twodeadsluts Onegoodfuck for almost 10 years — at his apartment on a quiet street in Medford. “Our mantra throughout booking this was to make it the most negative show ever,” he explains.

They’re off to a good start. The bill includes names like Anal Hearse and Vomit Arsonist. Broderick’s outfit is known (but not guaranteed) to strip naked, tackle audience members, and throw chairs. Others are reported to have used arc welders and tear gas on stage. Peter Sotos, a member of the British group Whitehouse, was once arrested on child-pornography charges (which were dropped), and he’s been known for decorating ’zines with swastikas. On top of all that, local anarchists Anal Cunt are playing. Seems like a miserable time all around.

Power electronics as a genre began when Whitehouse broke out in 1980, and it’s gone through remarkably little change since. It was brutal electronic noise on the heels of the industrial howl of bands like Throbbing Gristle and Einstürzende Neubauten, the last frontier of shock terror music. Scads of US and European bands followed suit, never breaking big but building tiny, fetishistic fan bases around the world. Power electronics is the end of the line, way out past the last vestiges of taste and sensibility. And it’s lonely out there.

I ask Giesing whether he or others in the Boston PE crew have been banned from anywhere. “In a sense, we’re banned from everywhere, because the club owners all think no one will come to see us.”

This stuff was not designed to get fans — pulsing, churning growls forced from racks of electronics, mic feedback, vocalists barking and screaming. Over the phone from Chicago, Mark Solotroff, founder of Bloodyminded and the influential Intrinsic Action, puts the appeal bluntly. “I just want to see a good show. I want to be entertained, and I want to see something I can’t see at every show.”

Solotroff, who runs the label BloodLust and dabbles in freelance trend research for advertising agencies, has eased up on stage lately. “I don’t go out of my way to be mean anymore.” I ask whether it’s gotten any easier to reconcile a normal day-to-day life with one that involves walls of feedback, puking noise loops, and screaming songs like “Shotgun Held to Face by Severely Cross-Eyed Addict While Attempting To Remove Girlfriend from Known Drug House.” “When you’re at dinner with your parents and they want to know what you’re working on, you just kind of slump down in your chair, because those conversations never go well. There’s never been a point where this stuff has been socially acceptable.”

I wonder whether that will ever change. “No,” Solotroff says. “And probably for good reason.”

The last album from Kentucky's Cadaver In Drag (2007's Raw Child) showed that the band was just as apt to deliver a grinding slab of metallic hypno-sludge as they were to blast skulls with a brutal industrial/noise assault, existing somewhere betwixt the realms of the harsh noise cassette scene and the low-fi avant-metal underground. When you dig back into their catalog, though, you'll find their earlier material harsh and based in extreme power electronics, as was explored on their now out of print Abuse CD-R. This new disc on Bloodlust! collects both the out-of-print Abuse material and a track from their also long-gone Breathing Sewage cassette for an even mix of vicious power electronics / industrial noise and the sort of damaged metallic dronesludge that these guys are so great at doing, with an extra unreleased track added on for good measure.

The opening track "Abuse 1" is a juddering twenty-two minute mass of sound populated by an omnipresent static throb that sounds like the buzz of a piece of heavy electronic equipment on dying batteries emanating a deep bone-rattling drone that slowly changes pitch throughout the track, while scraping metal noises mix with high-pitched feedback warble. This slowly builds in intensity until the midway point, when the distorted screams kick in and the feedback and distorted electrical throb all become much more violent and frenzied. It's a heavy, astringent industrial attack with a Broken Flag/Ramleh vibe. The second track "Abuse II" is shorter at nine minutes, and continues the riotous electronic spew with an opening blast of metallic feedback buzz that blossoms into mortar-like explosions of crushing distortion. This buzzing, swarming hive of grimy electronic grind fluctuates violently over the duration of the track, going from underwater squelch to brutal overdriven clots of noise that almost sound like a gang of guitars are being throttled and destroyed beneath the heavy fug of amplifier buzz.

It's not until we get to the "Breathing Sewage" track from the 2005 cassette of the same name that we come to the sort of noisy, sludgy metallic heaviness that Cadaver In Drag delivered on Raw Child . For nearly ten minutes, the band bathes in monstrous distorted guitar rumble and syrupy sludge, like an early Sunn jam drenched in industrial noise and mixed with all of the levels in the red, a massive earth-shaking mass of crumbling metallic drone that sloughs off huge sheets of rotten feedback and sputtering cable buzz while the singer bellows in rage, his voice cloaked by intense distortion, a fusion of brutal power electronics and ambient doomdrone that becomes more and more chaotic as the piece progresses, turning into pure chaos at the end as messy guitar shredding and lumbering over-modulated rhythms appear.

The final track "Leak" is previously unreleased and is the most overtly PE-influenced track on the disc. Here, the band join forces with Mark Solotroff (Of Bloodyminded/Nightmares) for a shrieking, malevolent bout of old school power electronics. Painful metallic feedback scrapes the edges of eardrums and wavering flanged noises flutter in the background while Solotroff rants maniacally; the track becomes noisier towards the end, before fading out in a cloud of effects

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

The Mike Williams (Eyehategod)/BLOODYMINDED singles arrived from Chrome Peeler and they look excellent! I will try to have at least a few with me in Boston this weekend... (See here for previous info post)

There is a copy of the long-out-of-print Intrinsic Action and Iugula-Thor "Ensemble Sacres Garcons" CD currently on eBay. Judging by the chilly air, we must be approaching that time of the year when Andrea and I entertain the annual idea of finally releasing ESG "II."

I have recently been hearing some great tracks by the Australian group Ebola Disco. This video clip demonstrates the balance that they strike between crisp, modern sound and old-school industrial aesthetics:

Sunday, November 01, 2009

- Fun opening last night at Kavi Gupta! Locrian played an excellent set with a "nice" visual pairing. It was cool to see/hear it live, after getting a preview, ages ago, on a laptop. Scott Treleaven's work was really nicely installed and it was great to meet him, too! Beyond that, my Halloween film choices were totally lame and the neighborhood was a ghost town (good). The holiday was a bit of a non-event...